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Literature, African American
4 articles on Literature, African American
Literature
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 8243 Includes: African American Literature to 1800 | African American Literature, 1800–1830 | Antebellum African American Literature | Postbellum and Reconstruction Writing | African American Voice in Literature | Bibliography | Bibliography[This entry contains two subentries dealing with African American literature in the United States from the seventeenth century through the late nineteenth century.] From the first arrivals of Africans in the Americas in the sixteenth century through the dawning of a national movement for the abolition of slavery in the United States in the 1830s, African Americans established a powerful literary tradition. Enslaved and free African Americans developed a variety of oral and print modes of literary expression: song, storytelling, signifying, preaching, and public speaking as well as published poetry, narratives, journals, petitions, political manifestos, almanacs, letters, hymnals, and histories. Early African American literature embraces all of these forms. It documents a remarkable diversity of experiences, beliefs, desires, concerns, and visions among enslaved and free peoples of African descent. Most important, early African American literature demonstrates the crucial role of literacy and the imagination ...
Read full articleLiterature
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 18768 Includes: The African American Essay. | Washington and Pragmatism. | Literary Revival. | Prose Fiction. | From Nadir to the New Negro. | “Passing” and Its Discontents. | The New Negro Movement. | Radicalism and Then the War. | Approaching the Modern. | After Ellison. | The Black Arts Movement. | The Contemporary World. | BibliographyBetween 1880 and the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910, African Americans lived through a time of increasing oppression and disenfranchisement, a time that the black sociologist Rayford Logan called “the Nadir.” Nevertheless, African American literature regained some of its antebellum vitality during this time, moving gradually away from the autobiographical narrative and toward a wider range of literary and cultural production.One genre that persisted in African American writing after Reconstruction was the secular essay. Like the Reverend Edward Bryant's “Our Duties, Responsibilities: Negro Literature” (1885), many of these essays were secular in subject matter but written by ministers in church-sponsored journals. Other essays were ...
Read full articleLiterature, African American
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 5773 Includes: Reading, Writing, and Black Humanity: Phillis Wheatley | Antebellum Writers in the Urban North and the Tradition of Protest | The Slave's Story | First African American Literary Renaissance | Literature of the “New Negro” | Harlem Renaissance | Modernism, Naturalism, and Urban Realism: 1940–1960 | Black Arts Movement | African American Literature after the 1970sAlthough black Americans responded to their enslavement and the denial of their humanity in a number of ways, the emergence of African American literature reflects the centrality of writing to the project of seeking freedom and equality in the United States. At first, because of the European Enlightenment's stress on writing as the most visible sign of the ability to reason, literature presented a way for Africans in America to prove their humanity and demonstrate a capacity for artistic creation and imaginative thought. Later, literature developed into a vehicle through which African Americans could voice not only their rejection of slavery and institutionalized racism, but also their desire for freedom and recognition as full citizens of the United States. In the twenty-first century African American literature continues to be a means through which to right the historical record and counter the absence or distortion of black people in historical representation. ...
Read full articleLiterature, Black, in 18th-Century Britain and the U.S.
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 3278Although literacy was denied to the vast majority of English-speaking people of African descent during the age of slavery, a fortunate and determined few wrote or dictated their stories in the eighteenth century. Almost all such Anglophone blacks were subjects of the British monarch before the American Revolution, and many remained so during and after that event, though others became subjects of the new government of the United States.The first two known English-language publications by blacks appeared in North America in 1760. The prose Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man, published in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1760 by Briton Hammon, perhaps a free man, recounts his providential reunion with his owner or employer after many years of captivity and ...
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